Louise Nevelson (American, 1899-1988) Untitled, c. 1973-78

Louise Nevelson
(American, 1899-1988)
Untitled, c. 1973-78
black painted wood
80 x 48 x 5 1/4 inches.
Property from a Private Collection, Atlanta, Georgia

Provenance:
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia
Fay Gold Gallery, Atlanta
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2000

Exhibited:
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Locks Gallery, Louise Nevelson: Sculpture and Collages, October 1 - October 30, 1999, no. 10, illus.

Literature:
Judy Stein, Louise Nevelson: Collages, Locks Art Publications, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1997 (cover illus.)

Lot Essay:
A Portal to Nevelson’s World

In signature Nevelson fashion, Untitled (c. 1973-78) defies dimensional classification by transcending space to occupy the realms of both painting and sculpture.

Sparkling with charisma under her heavy mink eyelashes, Louise Nevelson (American, 1899-1988) became and remains one of the most important figures in twentieth-century American sculpture. Born Leah Berliawsky in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine), Nevelson’s family emigrated to Rockland, Maine, where her father eventually established a lumber business. Wood, a prominent feature in Nevelson’s work, was a constant presence in their home. Nevelson was very close with her mother, who suffered depression after their move, and would go to great lengths to dress herself and her children up in flamboyant clothes that she felt would have been sophisticated in their homeland. Marrying Charles Nevelson after high school satisfied her parents’ hope that she would end up in a wealthy family, and though they eventually separated, their union allowed the couple to move to New York City where she was able to study painting, drawing, singing, acting and dancing. She began to study full time at the Art Students League in 1929 and traveled to Europe to learn from Hans Hoffman. Upon her return she met Diego Rivera and worked as his assistant on his mural at Rockefeller Plaza while they allegedly had a brief affair, causing a rift between her and Rivera’s wife, renowned artist Frida Kahlo.

Throughout the 1930s Nevelson experimented with painting, drawing, lithography, and etching, but her truest love was sculpture. She won her first sculpture competition at the A.C.A. Galleries in New York in 1936, and her first solo exhibition at Nierendorf Gallery followed a few years later. Despite her rapidly growing career, Nevelson still struggled. As she explained in an interview:

After my first exhibition was over I destroyed all the work I’d done. What else could I do? I didn’t have a nickel. I had no place to store it, I never sold anything, so what was I to do? ...I had no choice at that time. I guess it was nearly forty years ago. I never would ask anyone for anything, so it was a struggle. Anyway, I did destroy them. All I have are a few photos of the work.

(Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped Our Times, by Lynn Gilbert).

Nevelson began to work on massive wall installations using found pieces of wood in the 1950s; though much of her production was destroyed, several of the surviving works are now owned by the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and MoMA. The scraps of wood allowed her to collage together geometric grids that she could then cover entirely in paint, studying the relationship of their shapes and crafting her own personal mythology from architectural elements entrenched with the personal histories of others.

Nevelson solidified her long-overdue commercial and critical success by the late 1960s, with her first retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1967. She spent the following years constructing major works and commissions, gigantic both in scale and in the recognition they brought. Nevelson referred to her immersive sculptures as “environments” and she became most known for her wall-like collaged reliefs, of which Untitled is an excellent example, made at the height of her artistic maturity. Uniformly coated in her hallmark unmodulated black paint, the careful arrangement of each structural element and the shadows they create serve as a portal into Nevelson’s world, extravagant and minimal all at once.